Best Hair Dryers

All blow dryers are not created equal. The ideal model should be speedy, powerful, and comfy to hold, with a long enough cord and attachments that work well with your hair's texture. In the Beauty Lab, we tested 20 different dryers on dozens of hair swatches to evaluate how fast they dried and whether they left hair shiny and smooth. Then, with feedback from our testers (whose tresses ranged from long to short and from super-curly to pin-straight), we crowned four winners. Here's the full blow-by-blow.

Quietest

A good pick if noisiness is a pet peeve. In addition to having a hushed motor, Hot Tools smooths hair, though it's best suited to finer strands (it's less powerful than our other picks). "Very quiet and very hot, making up for the airflow," said one tester.

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